Animal Welfare Policy

Barnes & Noble’s goal is for everything we sell to be produced under high quality and ethical standards. For the food and beverages that we serve, this means a commitment to socially responsible standards, including the promotion of animal welfare. We desire to source from suppliers who share our commitment to humane practices throughout an animal’s lifecycle. We encourage the following practices:

Supporting the responsible use of antibiotics to promote animal health, including the elimination of routine uses, such as growth promotion and routine disease prevention, of medically important antibiotics;

Eliminating the use of artificial growth hormones, and for poultry, fast growing practices;

Addressing concerns related to dehorning, tail docking, and castration both with and without anesthesia;

Phasing out gestation crates for pigs and cages for chickens; and

Improving the welfare of broiler chickens.

Specifically, our priority is to ensure we offer food made with ingredients such as poultry processed through humane systems and cage-free eggs.

Broiler Chicken Welfare

By 2024, we will source only chickens certified by Global Animal Partnership (GAP) and require all chickens to be processed in a manner that avoids live-dumping and live-shackling, and instead utilizes a pre-shackle, multi-step controlled-atmosphere processing system that’s widely hailed as more humane.

Cage-free Eggs

While there is still work to be done across the industry to increase supply to address market conditions, we are committed to a goal, by 2025, of a 100 percent cage-free egg supply chain for any food we prepare in our stores.